Word: legerdemain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...declaring the Postal Service's deficit "off budget," the number crunchers "saved" $1.7 billion. A similar bit of wizardry -- prepaying a $3 billion Pentagon payroll in the 1989 fiscal year -- "reduced" the 1990 deficit by that amount. Bush was in no position to resist the sleight of hand: the legerdemain was originally concocted by his budget director, Richard Darman...
...fiscal 1990, the law required Congress to produce a budget with a deficit of less than $110 billion. Despite the Administration's optimistic forecasts of continued strong economic growth and lower interest rates plus some fiscal legerdemain, congressional efforts fell $6.1 billion short...
...smears of colored mud on cloth manage, seemingly without intervention from the viewer, to recompose themselves as hard shiny metal, warm flesh, wind-ruffled grass or the sweaty sheen of a horse's flank, all in the blink of an eye. But no artist seems as explicit about this legerdemain as Velazquez. At 20, as The Waterseller attests, he was already a virtuoso of appearances. To be able to record both the half-sunken splash of water and the light dew of condensation on the pottery jar in the + foreground was to have touched a level of skill beyond that...
Abbott's way of juggling his glove amounts to legerdemain. He throws the ball and puts it on, catches the ball and takes it off. "The transfers aren't that difficult," he insists. "There's no dramatic story that goes with it. Just a matter of learning to do things a little differently. I never told myself, 'I want to be the next Pete Gray ((a one-armed outfielder who played the 1945 season with the St. Louis Browns)).' I said, 'I want to be the next Nolan Ryan...
...production, which will reopen April 7 at the Los Angeles Theater Center, Roscoe Lee Browne does an impressive star turn as the "conjure man" Bynum. But that is not the star role, and his vocal legerdemain only distracts from the inadequate James Craven as the play's emblem of unjust suffering, Herald Loomis. The visionary fit at the close of the first act and the self- mutilation at the finale, which terrified Broadway audiences, brought titters in San Francisco...